I chose Michael Perry's Population: 485 as the title I'd distribute for World Book Night*. I thought his tales of small town life, quirky characters and sense of humor would appeal to the potential readers I approached today at the local soup kitchen.

On my way into town with the books, I came upon a fellow with a cane I'd often seen walking along Monument Road. Since he was heading my way, with his back to traffic, I pulled over to offer him a ride. His brown hair fell well past his shoulders and he moved toward me with an unsteady step. I figured he didn't get many offers.

Turned out he didn't want a ride. He was walking as rehab from back surgery, though he said it wasn't working too well. Sometimes he did go to town, but this trip was an out and back to the mountain bike trailhead about a mile down the road. His name was Herb, he said, and he rented a room in the house up the road, which looks like the sort of place for folks who are recovering from one thing or another. He was wearing a jacket from the West Elk Mine, a coal operation owned by billionaire Bill Koch.

My first customer.

The second was the guy at the recycling center where I unloaded a mass of cardboard, cans and beer bottles. He listened to my pitch, then said, "I'll take it for my wife. She's the reader."

Who knows, he may pick it up himself if his wife starts reading him selections like this:

The Beagle has other problems. Both his ex-wives work at the only gas and convenience store in town. So he's gotten to where he avoids the Gas-N-Go. Drives to Bloomer for his morning gas and coffee. Sometimes he'll send his new girlfriend in to get him a can of chew. The ex's have been known to give her the evil eye, and sometimes they slap down the Kodiak a little sharply. "They don't like it," says the Beagle, "but they know my brand!" Big guffaw.

There's something every couple can chew on in that passage.

I parked next to the Catholic Outreach building and found a couple guys I know from the day center hanging out.

Roger has visited Wisconsin and Minnesota in his travels and said he was up for a book about life in the midwest.

"I was in jail for three days and was part way through a book set in Minnesota, but they wouldn't let me take it when I left," he said.

The giveaway is aimed at infrequent readers, and I suppose interrupted ones qualify, too.

I worked down the line outside the soup kitchen and got a lot of takers and a few polite refusals. I know from my time in the day center there are some avid readers on the street but some aren't very literate. (Last week, I confirmed the spelling of get and next for a texting guest.)

Paco turned me down. He reads, he says, but needs large print editions. Another man took a copy once he confirmed I wasn't handing out religious tracts. The two women in the photo above each took a copy.

After lunch I headed back to the parking lot and spied a man with a backpack and bedroll hugging the corner of the fence enacting the international sign for I couldn't hold it any more. I couldn't see his face when he turned around, but I recognized what he was slipping into a pocket of his pack.

Population: 485.

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* World Book Night is an annual celebration dedicated to spreading the
love of reading, person to person. Each year on April 23, tens of
thousands of people go out into their communities and give half a
million free World Book Night paperbacks to light and non-readers.

World Book Night is about giving books and encouraging reading in
those who don’t regularly do so. But it is also about more than that:
It’s about people, communities and connections, about reaching out to
others and touching lives in the simplest of ways—through the sharing of
stories.

My grandfather died more or less as expected. He had been
half gone already and the liver disease put a period to a long story with the
bottle.

My father made the trip alone from Colorado down to the
ranch, a remote, hardscrabble cattle operation on the Arizona-Mexican border near
Douglas. He came home with a few artifacts, including a lever action Winchester
and a mare named Cherry. Since I was away at college in Minnesota and everyone
out west had pity on me, I inherited a mail order ranch coat that was fine for
the desert but wasn’t much good to me until April.

If I’d had my wits about me, I would’ve asked for him to
bring back a book.

Lately I've been reflecting on some of the sources and inspirations for my novel. Monument Road is a contemporary story featuring a rancher who's isolated and out of time—both in his life and his place in the century.

The book didn't start out at all as a "western," and it had little to do with the traditions of western novels—whether the old time fantasies of Zane Grey and Louis L'Amour, the horse-crazy books by Anna Sewell and Marguerite Henry or the modern westerns by Thomas McGuane, Kent Haruf, Cormac McCarthy, James Galvin and Richard Ford.

But damn, once a rancher shows up, pretty soon there are horses, maybe cows, and land that is either failing or outgrowing its usefulness. Next thing you know, you're penned in.

Leonard Self started out as just one of the cast, invented to be part of an ensemble playing variations on the tune of suicide. A diversity hire, you might say.

But as I began making him a real character, with credible reasons for ending his life, the old cuss started to grow on me—and before I knew it, he'd taken over the narrative and I was stuck writing western fiction, a regional novel or some such.

I blame it on the horses.

There's no surer way to be branded a genre writer—okay, plus spaceships and vampires—than to put a ranch in your story. I mean, your protagonist could be a writer, an architect or even, god help us, a horny college professor, and you would be considered right in the mainstream. But give a character a corral as his workplace?

I tried to subvert the stereotype. Leonard wants to free himself from the land rather than cling to it. I put several guns in his hand that were never fired. His experiences around horses revealed character but were largely tangential to the story.

I wonder if reviewers will notice.

Once I started getting a complex about this, I remembered a book at my grandfather's ranch I'd seen as a boy. A relative pointed to a character named Russ (my grandfather's middle name which he preferred to Homer) and said, that's grandpa.

I was too young and too interested in the ranch itself to read more than a few paragraphs. I got the impression it was a cowboy novel with rough cowpokes riding the range.

Many years later, after my own father's death, family history became more important, and I wondered about that book. I thought I remembered the title as Red Embers, and occasionally I searched for that title, but all I came across was a novel about a California girl and her polo pony by another juvenille fiction writer, Dorothy Lyons.

Polo? I figured the book with my grandfather's name in it was some pulp fiction that had turned to dust by now.

But today, I took one more stab and tracked down an Arizona cousin. If the book had survived in the family it was likely to be down there.

She wrote back saying she didn't remember the book, but she had heard that Grandpa Quimby had trained polo ponies back in the early 1920's in California.

The book I remember didn't have a dust jacket. The cover art for the Lyons book would've made clear the novel wasn't about fading cowboy campfires. I'm doing more research before I declare myself—including finding a copy to read—but it looks like I might be more connected to the horsey tradition than I thought.

If you're downtown much, you've seen the couple I'll call Jorge and
Vanessa.

He moves slowly, pushing a sort of heavy duty luggage cart loaded with clothing and miscellaneous possessions. His impassive expression can look like a dangerous glare because of his unkempt hair and fu-manchu. Sometimes his moustache is flecked with foam. I think he takes medications that sometimes put him in a bit of fog.

But if you speak with him, you'll find he observes the world with amusement.

The bird-like Vanessa dresses a bit further out than Big Edie of Grey Gardens, favoring long dresses and multiple layers that cover most of her body in all seasons. This week's head gear consisted of a colorful silk scarf, a knit wool cap and a brown plastic grocery bag.

She's very particular about hygiene. She calls me Roger.

I hadn't seen them at the Day Center all winter until this week, so I asked Jorge whether their living situation had improved.

This Tioga's only 35, but you get the idea.

No, he said. They were camping again, but over the winter they'd met a woman in the park. She'd offered them a place to stay in her back yard—a 40-year-old Dodge Tioga.

But one night in January it was so cold Jorge told Vanessa, I don't know if we can make it. We've got to do something.

So they found the woman's house and she let them move into the camper. When she came to the door and told us we could stay, I thought we'd found an angel, he said. Later he realized her friendliness was largely the product of alcohol and pot.

The Tioga was in bad shape but it was better than sleeping outside. During the day Jorge worked to replace the floor and other parts of the interior suffering from dry rot.

Their host was anxious to get her yard cleaned up and she wanted them to take the camper, Jorge said, but the title was kind of funny and they had no place to park it. (She had two sons living with her but couldn't get them to even take out the garbage.)

With the warmer weather, Jorge and Vanessa are back on the street and presumably their angel will come up with another strategy to unload the Tioga.

Last August, the local paper
announced it would
help us recognize "vagrants"—who have “rejected much of society’s norms,
even while they eagerly accept its charity”—from “the truly homeless”
who have “involuntarily fallen on hard times.”

The Daily Sentinel distinguishes between the term “homeless,” for those temporarily
without a home and working to improve their lot, and “vagrant,” for
those choosing a lifestyle without permanent residence, as defined by
Merriam-Webster.

As I wrote to the editor at the time, I’m all for precise language as long as it reflects precise
distinctions. But how does a distant oberserver know the good homeless from the bad ones?

Have the mentally ill fallen on hard times voluntarily or not? Will
compilers of The Blotter determine for us which persons arrested are
trying to better their lives?

Will reporters ask people without homes whether they “eagerly accept“
charity or do so reluctantly? How long must someone try to get back on
his or her feet before that person qualifies as a vagrant?

Why is losing a home through foreclosure taken as evidence of good
intentions, while having a one’s campsite repeatedly disrupted by
authorities is no excuse for wandering from place to place?

What about common criminals and suspicious characters with fixed addresses? Do we need labels for them, too?

It may be comforting to believe people are worthy/unworthy, lazy/industrious, smart/stupid, able/disabled. But the world doesn't quite line up that way. Not from day-to-day or even within one person.

In print, the newspaper seems to have backed off its declaration. The labels, though, never go away.

The man I'll call Martin walks around the corner and back before coming in the front door of the Day Center. That's a common approach by first-time visitors since the building has no sign to identify us—just a partially glassed-in vestibule that might once have been the entry to a defunct dry cleaners.

Right now, though, it's a pretty good bet this is the place he's been sent to learn about services for the homeless, since through the window he can see a man with two black eyes who's too intoxicated to be admitted.

Martin's a small man in his 70s with a round, pleasant, hypertensive face and white hair. Imagine actor Ray Walston, long past his My Favorite Martian days, playing a leprechaun.

Only this leprechaun is towing an oxygen bottle with one hand and grips the handle of three-footed cane with the other.

Martin has toddled over from the Rescue Mission, a few blocks away. The Rescue Mission specializes in recently released prisoners who are trying to get reintegrated into straight society and need a stable address to give their parole officer. He told me upon release he was dropped on a street corner in Denver with a box of his possessions that he couldn't transport, given his walker and oxygen bottle. He went into a store to call a cab, and by the time he came back out, his box was gone.

He doesn't say how he got to Grand Junction, and I don't ask. With new guests, my job is to be welcoming, orient them to our services as well as what they want to know about other help, and collect some basic information.

Are you homeless? How long? Where are you living? Are you a veteran? Disabilities? Employed or looking for work?

We also ask if they have identification and for contact information for another person we could reach in case of an emergency. Many do not have driver licenses. They have a state ID card, a corrections ID or need to replace a lost ID. A fair number list a local relative, and a similar number, including Martin, can't supply the name of anyone at all.

In Martin's case, he had a Colorado Corrections ID and another card that identified him as a registered sex offender.

In my forthcoming novel, Monument Road, a young man working in his sister's day care center is accused of inappropriate touching. Joe Samson, a local reporter, decides to use the case as a hook for a deeper investigation. He interviews the police official responsible for tracking the county's sex offenders:

The captain unrolled his bundle, a county map covered
with colored plastic tapes, the sort used to mark legal documents for
signature. “Every one of these tabs represents a registered sex offender,” he
said. “About half of these are in Grand Junction, the rest in the county’s
jurisdiction. The vision is to be able to generate a map from the database and see
all our sex offenders in one place.” He paused. “So to speak.”

The map covered McLearn’s desk. In places, the tabs
were stuck atop each other, as if a load of autumn leaves had been dumped on a
neighborhood. Joe’s eyes scanned immediately to the Redlands. No flags close to
his house. He looked for the Crimmins-Diaz address. There was a scatter of red
and yellow tabs on Orchard Mesa, but none very near Wee Amigos Day Care.

McLearn said, “County-wide, we’re watching more than
four hundred. The number’ll just keep growing, because once these guys
register, it’s tough to get off the list. If they stay clean, they can petition
for removal, but who wants to be the judge who decided a guy was not a
threat—then he goes out and abducts a little girl?”

“So the numbers
keep growing, the problem looks worse, the public cries out for more protection
and the numbers grow some more.” Joe meant to phrase it as a question.

“You could put it that way,” said McLearn. “I didn’t.
There are definitely predators you want to supervise forever. But that’s only
about four of the four hundred guys we’re tracking. The rest—especially your
child molesters—their risk of re-offending is way lower than your average
criminal.”

“And why is that?” Joe asks. “Do the extra restraints
work?”

McLearn shuffled through a drawer, then gave up
looking. “A while back, there was a big hue and cry over child molesters living
near schools and playgrounds. The state did a study before passing a new law
restricting where they could live. It found their distance from schools and
such didn’t make any difference. You know what mattered most?”

“I’m guessing it wasn’t some extra-special public
humiliation,” Joe said. McLearn gave him a sharp look. “I mean, it seems like a
funny system, where a paroled drug dealer or murderer could move in next door
and you wouldn’t know it, but you get notified about a guy who got a
sixteen-year-old pregnant. So what does matter most?”

“Support systems,” said McLearn. “The guys are more
likely to succeed if they have treatment, a job, friends and neighbors who
support them. The trouble with shaming these guys—they’re more likely to move
away from their support network to get out of range of the pitchforks. We have
people come here from out of state exactly for that reason. I don’t want to say
community notification’s a joke, but most of the people we have here are
unlikely to reoffend. For the most part, you’re already going to know the
person who molests your child, and it’s someone you trust.”